Re: [Matplotlib-users] FuncFormatter and Colorbar

[Eric F. <ef...@ha...>]

Michael Droettboom wrote:
> Thanks for the patch.  However, perhaps a more general solution would be 
> to use the Python locale module to format numbers according to different 
> locales.  And expose a kwarg select between the user's preferred locale, 
> the current U.S. English-centric defaults as they are now, or an 
> arbitrary locale using an ISO language code.  That seems like it could 
> be a better long-term solution, since there are different number formats 
> all over, not just in Germany.
> 
> All that said, internationalization is hard -- especially for us 
> sheltered people in the U.S. where the defaults are most often correct. 
>   I may be missing an important detail here.
> 
> Cheers,
> Mike

Mike,

I agree that this problem needs to be solved.  I was looking at it a 
year or so ago, with the idea of putting in simple options rather than 
full internationalization, but I never followed up on it.  Until your 
message I had never looked at the documentation for the locale module. 
It *might* be possible to fix the formatters by replacing a few 
"somestring % variables" constructs with calls to 
locale.format_string(somestring, variables)--but this is new in python 
2.5.  Without this it looks like it might be much harder.  The formatter 
code is already a bit convoluted because of all the variations--latex, 
mathtex, plain, with or without scientific notation.

Actually, I think the option I was looking at a year ago was what is 
handled by the "grouping" arg in locale.format_string--the ability to 
use commas or dots to break up triplets of digits.

Eric